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Dear LazarI donGÇÖt mind long posts. In fact, this is a very long one too. What is getting me a bit bored is this constant discussion about whether Macedonians were Greek or not.As you said, it could be interesting to determine AlexanderGÇÖs ethnicity, but actually I particularly donGÇÖt feel GÇ£ext...

thanks guys. it was really helpful
alejandro

Dear allI was lately reading some articles (quite old, must be said, around the 40s and 50s) about Alexander, and I found a reference to a "Mercenary source", especially for the pre-Gaugamela phase of Alex's conquests. It is supposed to be the narrative of a (Greek?) mercenary (Memnon's?),...

Hi allI read somewhere that Arrian's goal was to "write the best histoy of Alexander ever", and maybe that's why he says something like that. It's not so much that there were no poems/proses about him, but they were not good ones. Of course, he accepts that Callisthenes, Ptolemy, Aristobul...

GÇ£The only problem would be, we would all want to be AlexanderGÇ¥Very true. We would probably end up cutting our throats out like the Diadochi (I want to be Ptolemy Soter!;-)
RegardsAlejandro

Thank you for doing my homework, smittysmitty!

What about kausias?No, please donGÇÖt laugh (yet). Recently I read an (academic) article quoting ancient sources, and the thesis was that the interior of kausias (made of leather, possibly) were used as a means to transmit secret messages. An (untanned) kausia would be the GÇ£paperGÇ¥ and the person...

It starts with Gaugamela? Am I smelling a prequel or what? (depending on the box success, of course)Alejandro

Hi CJMy two cents:Loyalty: When ill after his splash in the Cydnus (?), and having received a letter from Parmenion telling him that his physician had been bought by Persian gold to poison him, he handed in the letter to the physician while drinking the concoction prescribed by him. When he visited ...

As mentioned by someone else (Marcus?), the main problem is that the Makedonian royal house had a record of kings that died/were killed before their heirs came of age, so I think the Philip-Alexander participation in battle together was a rather unusual situation (though I have no hard evidence to s...

Of course, we should also consider the possibility that no ring was actually given to Perdikkas. Arrian doesnGÇÖt mention it, and though many scholars argue that PtolemyGÇÖs biased interest may be behind its GÇ£omissionGÇ¥ (you donGÇÖt want your fiercest enemy to be considered the legitimate recipie...

Hi MarcusThe author uses King, but says that she does it simply because of "tradition". She refers then to a book that investigates the issue: Robert Drews, "Basileus: The evidence for Kingship in Geometric Greece", Yale Classical Monographs, number 4. New Haven, Yale University ...

Hi CompanionsI recently read an article:Hellenistic Kings, War, and the Economy M. M. Austin The Classical Quarterly, New Series, Vol. 36, No. 2. (1986), pp. 450-466.The author mentions that "basileus" and "king" are not interchangeable. She aduces that to be "basileus"...

Hi allI remember having read this somewhere in my adolescence. I reckon it could be a kids-version of Plutarch or a bad recollection of an episode of the romance. In any case, I remembered it lately after many years of having read it, and smiled while thinking about it, so I wanted to share it with ...

I particularly disagree with the argument that this would be the ONLY reason for Alexander willing to conquer the whole world, but I find the description of the Macedonian royalty as very limited by the aristocracy a very appealing one. I know there has been quite a discussion about the degree of in...